Blast from the Past

47

Inside the attic flat Polly kissed Jack, grateful to him for trying to fight the Bug and glad not to be alone. Jack returned her kisses while trying to catch his breath, tasting the salty tears around her lips. She felt so small and helpless. Jack longed to protect her, to possess her. At that moment, he and Peter were experiencing very similar emotions. Jack steeled himself against such thoughts, against Polly’s magic.

“I didn’t get him,” he said. “He’d gone.”

“You’ll never get him,” Polly replied. “He’s invulnerable. I’ve been trying for so long.”

Jack put his lips to Polly’s ear. “Did you ever think about killing him?” he whispered.

What a question. Of course she’d thought about killing him. Victims of stalkers often find themselves thinking about nothing else. Polly had wished that sick bastard dead a thousand times.

“No, I don’t mean wishing him dead, Polly,” Jack said. “I mean actually getting him dead. Killing him. For real.”

“Don’t joke,” Polly replied. “You don’t know what it’s like. If you knew what it was like to be a victim, how awful it is, you wouldn’t joke.”

Gently Jack sat Polly down upon the bed and fetched her drink. “I’m not joking,” he said. “I’ll kill him for you.”

“Oh, Jack, if only.” She was near to tears again.

“Polly.” Jack spoke firmly now. “I’ll kill him for you. I just need to know who he is and where he lives.”

Polly’s head swam. It was such a lovely thought. Such a truly lovely thought. To have the Bug dead. Squashed. Gone for ever. Not warned off, not threatened with arrest, not made to give a solemn undertaking to stay away, but dead. Completely and utterly ceasing to exist. It was a beautiful dream. But that was what it was, a dream. You couldn’t just kill people.

Jack knew what she was thinking. “I’m a soldier,” he said. “Killing people is what I do. It’s not such a big deal.”

“When soldiers kill people it’s legal?”

“Since when did you ever care about the law? Certainly not when I knew you. There is a higher law, that’s what you used to say. Or maybe you think it’s OK that I kill strangers whose only crime is that they come from a different country. Persecuting the weak and intimidating women is fine as long as it’s legal.”

“I’m not talking about justice,” Polly said. “I’m talking about the law, that’s all. You’d get caught.”

Jack smiled that charming, confident smile. “Hey, I’m out of here tomorrow. I’m gone. I’m on an army transport to Brussels and then home to the States. You think if I bump off some sad lowlife, nolife nut in Stoke Newington, somebody’s going to say, ‘Hey, I bet a general in the United States army did this.’ Never in a trillion years.”

“Stop talking like that.”

“I was in Special Forces, Polly. Believe me, I know how to hit a guy discreetly. I can do it on my way to the airfield and still get breakfast.”

Polly was silent now. She wanted to tell him to stop again but the words would not come.

“I mean, the guy’s connected to you,” Jack continued, “but he’s not connected to me, right? Of course you’re connected to me, Polly, but only you and I know that, don’t we? That’s true, isn’t it, Polly?”

By a stroke of great good fortune Jack had stumbled upon a way of finding out exactly what he most wanted to know.

“I mean, if I’m going to do this thing I need to be sure that there’s nothing to connect me with you. Is there anything?”

Polly spoke as if in a trance. “I only told the whole story once, to a guy called Ziggy, in a VW camper near Stonehenge, but he was stoned and didn’t hear me.”

“Anybody else?”

“A few people, you know, over the years. Every now and then I get drunk and say that I once fucked a soldier at Greenham, but I never go into details. I don’t like to remember, Jack.”

Polly was speaking, but it seemed like she was listening to someone else. She could hear herself reassuring Jack. “There is no way on earth anyone could connect me with you, Jack.”

They stared at each other for a moment. Jack was grinning.

“Well, there you are, then,” he said breezily. “Where do I find him?”

He wasn’t joking, she could see that. She was in a dream, but it was rapidly becoming reality. Polly drew herself back from the brink. It was time to put an end to this dangerous fantasy.

“You can’t kill him. I don’t want you to kill him. I don’t want you even to talk about it. No matter how much I hated someone I would never ever want to kill them.”

Jack just kept grinning, his handsome eyes sparkling and his voice light. “People die all the time. It’s no big deal.”

“Shut up.”

“Just try to think of this guy as an exploiter of the planet. You remember what I was saying before? About how every breath we take we’re doing damage to others? Consuming the world’s resources, abusing the world’s peasants. Why not let me reduce the abuse?”

“Shut up!”

“This man is an evil, useless, pointless waste of food and air. Let me take him out. We’ll all breathe easier. You’ll be doing the world a favour.”

Jack was still smiling; it was such a friendly smile. “Tell me where he lives.”

“No!” said Polly, deeply shocked at the sincerity of Jack’s tone. He really did mean it. He really did believe that murdering people could be justified just because you didn’t like them. She was horrified at the thought. No matter what a person’s crimes, the death penalty was never justified. No one had the right to take a life. The fact that she was the victim did not change that fact.

“Shut up, Jack! I mean it. Stop talking like that, it’s horrible.”

Jack shrugged and went to fix more drinks. “OK, OK,” he said. “If you don’t have the courage to defend yourself. If your precious principles have so weakened you that you don’t have the guts to make your own personal decision about what’s right. Lenin knew what to do, didn’t he? If you have something you believe in you defend it by any means necessary. Don’t you believe in your right to happiness, Polly?”

“Of course I believe in it!”

“Then have the courage to defend it.”

Jack poured Polly another huge Bailey’s and Coke and she gulped it down hungrily.

“Polly, I have to do something to help. This guy is truly a terrible thing. We can’t just let him carry on abusing you.”

Even in her distress Polly thought about asking at what point Jack had suddenly become so concerned about her wellbeing, but she didn’t. For the first time someone was genuinely trying to help her with the problem that had been destroying her life.

“Come on,” said Jack. “Maybe I wouldn’t even have to kill him. I could just scare him a little. It’d be very easy to scare him.”

“It wouldn’t do any good. He’s too mad.”

“Polly, believe me. I know how to scare people and I know how to hurt them. When I do it they’re scared and they stay hurt… Come on. You have a right to defend your life. Not in the law, maybe, but under any concept of natural justice. Tell me where he lives.”

Polly did not believe in violence of any sort.

She absolutely did not believe in violence.

That fact was a mainstay of her life.

On the other hand…

She had suffered at this man’s hands for so very long. If anybody deserved to be punished it was him… And if it worked? If the Bug could be scared off, not killed but scared off, for ever? The prospect of liberation rose like a new dawn before Polly’s eyes.

Jack could see that she was weakening. “Where does he live, Polly?” he asked once more in his friendly, gentle tone.

Polly made her decision. She would act in her own defence. She would empower herself and defend her life. She would give Jack the Bug’s address and she was glad. Why the hell should she suffer any more if she had the means to fight back? She had never done anything wrong and she did not deserve to be persecuted. That bastard deserved everything he got. Polly was fed up with being a victim. Let the other guy be the victim for a change.

The Bug’s details were written on the court papers. Papers Polly had always studiously avoided studying for fear of becoming further connected to her persecutor. She retrieved them from the file which she kept under a pile of dirty clothes, some books and a pair of running shoes and handed them over to Jack.

“Do anything you like,” she said firmly, “but please don’t kill him.”